And, just as with last year's releases, HP has collaborated with Beats by Dr. Dre on Beats Audio to bring a special edition version to market. The Envy 14 Beats Edition ditches the professional grade mixing tools the inch version offered in exchange for a much lower price.

Portions of this review were taken from our review of the original HP Envy Design Stylistically, the Envy 14 Beats Edition looks the same as its predecessor, the special edition Envy Instead of the original Envy's taupe, etched aluminum and magnesium body, the Envy 14 Beats Edition is a smooth, matte black. A red Beats by Dr.

Dre logo sits prominently at the center of the lid, and the motif extends to the deck, with its red accents and red backlit keys. We like the soft-touch coating on the palm rest and mostly smooth black bottom where you can attach the optional slice battery. As it now accommodates an optical drive, this notebook's dimensions Just be prepared to carry around some weight; the 5.

HP ENVY 14-1114ef Beats Edition Notebook PC Product Specifications

We really felt the weight while carrying the notebook in a messenger and backpack. Nevertheless, the Envy 14 Beats Edition is easily one of the tightest-looking notebooks on the market.

Heat One of the biggest problems we had with the original Envy 15 was its poor heat dissipation; that notebook's quad-core CPU raised the touchpad to degrees Fahrenheit, and the wrist rest to degrees. Thankfully, the Envy 14 Beats Edition is not as toasty. After playing a Hulu HP Envy 14-1160se Beats Edition Notebook Qualcomm Mobile Broadband at full screen for 15 minutes, the touchpad measured 87 degrees, the space between the G and H keys was 91, and the middle of the underside was a somewhat uncomfortable degrees, compared to the Envy 14's measurements of 81, 82, and 98 in these respective areas.

The heat by the vent reached an unpleasant degrees. New, though, is backlighting: While it only has two settings on or off, as opposed to the gradient lighting on MacBook Prosit's a nice addition. And the red on this special edition just adds another layer of cool. While typing, we liked the smooth surface of the keys and the lack of flex, but we sometimes had to press slightly harder than usual.

We appreciated the quick access keys for adjusting the volume and brightness. As before, HP integrated the mouse buttons into the touchpad, which is a spacious 4. We wish it was moved slightly more to the left, but we didn't encounter the problems we had with the Envy namely, our palm accidentally moving the cursor.

Overall, navigating the desktop was easy--as it should be. Historically with all non-Apple touchpads that use the pad for clicking, those who use two hands to navigate will find that the cursor moves abruptly when they click; this was less of an issue on the Envy 14, though it still happened on occasion.

HP Envy 14 Beats Edition Review

Multitouch gestures worked fairly well, but not as smoothly as the glass touchpad on the MacBook. Two-finger scrolling was spotty, and when pinching to shrink an object, we had to remember that our thumb could not start out in the area where the buttons were.

The x screen displays up to 82 percent of the color gamut, and has a max brightness of nits. Whether we were watching movies stored on the hard drive or streamed from the web, colors were bright and crisp and popped off the screen, while blacks were lustrous and deep with no artifacts.

When placed side by side with the inch MacBook Pro, we found the Envy 14 to be pretty evenly matched. While watching the same HD trailer for Iron Man 2, we noticed slightly crisper images on the Mac, but it was a pretty fine point.

Viewing angles were excellent, though we found the glossy finish kicked back a lot of reflections in brighter settings.